The two core shopping functions that didn't work without a mouse

Industry

UK independent fashion & homeware retailer, online only

What we tested

Homepage, a category listing page, a product page, cart, and checkout

Testing method

Automated scan first, then manual keyboard-only navigation and NVDA, a free screen reader commonly used for UK compliance testing

The challenge

A multi-level category structure, filterable product listings and an email capture popup, a fairly typical ecommerce setup, and exactly the kind of site where a scan can miss whether core shopping functions actually work for someone who can't use a mouse.

The solution: automated scan, then manual testing

We ran an automated scan first, the same free type of check anyone can run in seconds.

• Critical (1): an image missing alt text, so a screen reader can't convey what it shows.
• Serious (2): links with no announceable text, leaving their purpose unclear (6 instances), and text with insufficient contrast against its background (3 instances).
• Moderate (2): content sitting outside any landmark region (7 instances), and a page missing a level-one heading.
• Minor (1): alt text duplicating visible text (4 instances).

This is a more substantive list than we often see, and all of it is worth fixing. But every issue on this list is a problem of description, things being unlabelled, unclear, or hard to read. None of it tells you whether the site can actually be operated. We then tested by hand: tabbing through every interactive element and listening to the site with NVDA.

The result: what only manual testing found

You can't browse by subcategory without a mouse

The main navigation uses dropdown menus. By keyboard, the dropdowns don't open at all. Tabbing to a top-level category and pressing Enter or Space navigates straight to the parent category page instead. Every subcategory on the site is unreachable by keyboard. This didn't appear in the scan at any severity: automated tools check whether a menu has appropriate roles and labels in the markup; they don't press Enter on it and check whether it opened. The markup here is adequate. The behaviour isn't.

The price filter cannot be used at all

Category pages include a price range slider. It cannot be operated by keyboard, arrow keys do nothing, and NVDA announces it only as "clickable," with no indication of what it is or what pressing anything would do. Filtering by price isn't a nice-to-have on a fashion and homeware site with a wide price spread, it's how most people shop. This is the second core function of the site that only works with a mouse, and again the scan flagged nothing.

Product prices are never announced

While testing product listings, NVDA never announced product prices anywhere. Combined with the broken price filter, a screen reader user can't filter by price, and can't hear prices either. That is a category page that has stopped functioning as a shop.

Everything else found by hand

• A 10%-off discount popup that isn't reachable by Tab until you've tabbed through the entire page first, with focus never moved into it when it opens.
• The popup's Subscribe button has no visible focus indicator, and neither does the "Write a review" button or an adjacent filter icon button.

Show 2 more findings from this audit

• Category images and their accompanying text links point to the same destination as separate links, so NVDA announces every category twice in a row.
• A star rating widget that NVDA announces as interactive, but which does nothing when activated, a pattern we've now seen on more than one audit.

The automated scan did its job: an image with no alt text, six unlabelled links, three contrast failures, missing landmarks and a missing H1, all real, all worth fixing. What it could not find is that this site's navigation and its price filter don't work without a mouse. A keyboard-only or screen reader customer arriving on this site can reach top-level categories, can't get to subcategories, can't filter by price, and can't find out what anything costs.